Review - Notes for a War Story by Gipi
October 22nd, 2007 John Posted in Books, Comic Books, Reviews |
The history of the comic book medium is filled with lots of serviceable work sharing space with lots of dreck and, slipped in there, a portion of creators whose work ranks up with the best in any medium that relies on storytelling as its center. Even higher still are those who create new ways to use the language in order to tell these stories — it could be argued, in fact, they created languages of their own in doing so. Will Eisner, Chris Ware and Robert Crumb are three of the more obvious, singular examples of this kind of visionary creating and, certainly, there are others.
I would add to the short list Italian cartoonist Gipi.
In his recently translated book “Notes for a War Story,” Gipi’s talents are on parade. On surface, this is a story of three ne’er-do-wells coping with war, surviving as best they can through a life of crime. In the hands of, say, Frank Miller, this story would be a posturing noir exercise, brimming with manhood and violence and, as a result, shallow. Gipi, however, seems devoid of the kind of strutting that accompanies so many gritty comic tales — instead, he seeks to expose the tenderness of his killers, discover the wounds of their work. Gipi’s delinquents are only out to prove things to themselves — to the reader, there is no hiding the people underneath. Posturing will not obscure the truth — heroes don’t exist because the pretense isn’t remotely possible.
Washed in a depressing greenish gray, Gipi’s landscape is that of an unnamed and war-ravaged country, disintegrating before his protagonists’ eyes. Three boys — not much different from the goofballs in his other novel from First Second Books, “Garage Band” — move from vagrancy and black market failure to low level mob jobs, slinking through the destruction as they collect money for a sleazy lone shark for whom the war is the best business venture to happen.
Through Gipi’s eyes and pen, the graphic novel echoes the films of Roberto Rossellini — it’s a neo-realist comic book, so much so that, in the tradition of that form, it’s as if the characters in it aren’t professional comic book characters all, but real people hired in the stead of those who were trained to do this. That’s a pretty unusual quality for a work of printed fiction to have — and it takes an unusually skilled creator to master such a sleight of hand — but if you imagine yourself in a movie house in the early 1960s, the smoke from people’s cigarettes curling up to the projector’s beam, then the pages of “Notes for a War Story” transport onto that very screen with great ease.
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